The MailChimp cover letter that got me a response

I got a lot of comments on The Cover Letter that will Land Me an Interview with Apple. Did that cover letter work, you ask? Yup! I had a great interview with the number one selling Apple store in the Pacific Northwest (and I think the number five store in the world - but I'm not 100% sure). The interviewer commented that it was the most unique cover letters he'd ever read.

I sent this one to MailChimp, the world's best email newsletter marketing platform (yes, even better than Constant Contact...but I digress). I got a response on this one too, but the job required me to move to Atlanta. Bummer.

Enjoy!

Hello Helga,

I love MailChimp. Just checkout my Twitter profile and you'll see a host of MailChimp plugs, shout-outs, questions, suggestions, and even a few tweets offering to help out other fellow MailChimp users. This brings me to the second thing I love - helping people.

That's why this job is exciting to me. I get to combine my love for helping people and my love for the best email marketing service provider. In my humble opinion, I think the combination will compliment your plan for world domination (I'm referencing the open marketing manager position of course)…at least in the email marketing arena.

I'd like to work for a troop that has awesome employees too. I have had a number of pleasant interactions. My favorite one by far was with Liz. I upgraded to a paid account, which meant you had to make sure my contacts were legit (and since 99% of my contacts were added by me, you were a bit curious - understandably). My response seemed to have been acceptable because my account was approved and I made Liz smile…which made me smile too.

I'd like to provide that same awesome experience to your customers as well.

As for the requirements you expect from me…

• Ability to handle online chats with multiple people at once…all while eating a banana split.
• Well-versed in the subtleties of chat/email etiquette.
  I'm patient, prompt, and have a slight case of OCD (this ensures that the first letter of every sentence is capitalized, the "i's" are dotted, and the "t's" are crossed before pressing "send").
• Superduper multi-tasking skills.
  Yup, I can pick, peel, and eat bananas while swinging from tree to tree.
• Fast reader, fast learner.
  I make Scoble blush...almost ;)
• Web power user (you can scan and answer questions on twitter, getsatisfaction, message boards, email, etc).
  Check, check, check, and check. Oh yeah, I blog and write fantastic email newsletters too, which by the way I'm hoping will be a part of my job responsibilities.
• HTML coding and/or design skills a plus, but not required (we'll train you, young Jedi).
  No need to train this Jedi, I can slice and dice valid XTHML & CSS and have a portfolio to show for it.

Still not convinced? I attached my resume just in case.

Hope to hear from you soon. Until then, I'll just be hanging around!

Thank you,

Bob Potter

Email Marketing for FREE! MailChimp

There are plenty of options out there when it comes to email marketing. Some simply choose to use more basic options like Google or Yahoo email groups, and some choose a fully featured email marketing provider. Usually the issue is cost. 

Yay! My MailChimp t-shirt arrived! I won it in a through twitter :)

Sent from windy may's iPhone

Untitled

Clever and Creative Gadgets

MIT Lab Online Personas: Louis Gray, Robert Scoble, Guy Kawasaki

From Benjamin, I discovered Personas, a creation of the Sociable Media Group at MIT Media Labs:

It uses sophisticated natural language processing and the Internet to create a data portrait of one's aggregated online identity. In short, Personas shows you how the Internet sees you.

Enter your name, and Personas scours the web for information and attempts to characterize the person - to fit them to a predetermined set of categories that an algorithmic process created from a massive corpus of data. The computational process is visualized with each stage of the analysis, finally resulting in the presentation of a seemingly authoritative personal profile.

Behind the scenes, it is using a Yahoo BOSS search engine and a semantic approach to visualization of online conversations.

So I took it for a spin and had some fun checking how it analyzed the online personae of Louis, Robert, and Guy. Please do not take this tool (and this post) seriously, because:

Personas demonstrates the computer's uncanny insights and its inadvertent errors, such as the mischaracterizations caused by the inability to separate data from multiple owners of the same name.

Actually, watching the tool work is much more fun than seeing the result. You see it process some not-so-nice comments across the social web (I observed "sleeps with FriendFeed", "attention-slut", and "career self-promoter" for example). I did notice that in the case of Louis, it found someone named Robert Louis Gray distorting his results to some extent, which was apparently not the case with Scoble or Kawasaki as far as I could see.

Observations

• Guy has a lesser Online component and a higher Travel, Management and Professional component
• Louis is into Books a lot more than Robert and Guy
• Both Robert and Louis are into Fame much more than Guy
• Guy likes Fashion the most
  
• Guy's Genealogy is unknown on the web
• Robert apparently doesn't like Committees
• Robert has a lot of Aggression, which Louis lacks completely
• Louis is into Movies a lot more than Robert/Guy (Flickchart?)
• Louis is most involved with Law
• Guy is least into Politics
• Religion is highest in Guy's persona, least in LG's
• Scoble is not Musical at all

If anything, these results show how the semantic web is a promising concept but has a long way to go.

Mailchimp users - read how they treat you - your account is at risk.. a bad review

I was sitting working the other night when an email from Mailchimp.com popped up in my inbox. Up until then I had been very happy with Mailchimp and felt they had a great offering, in fact I had even converted all my clients across to them from Getresponse. The email however went like this: -

 

Hello,

You're receiving this email because someone on the
MailChimp review team noticed content in your campaign(s)
that we'd classify as "risky" or "inappropriate."

We make no judgements here. We simply have to keep our
servers from getting blacklisted. Certain types of content
are just more prone to getting reported for abuse than
others.

Unfortunately, your content falls under that "risky" category.

To maintain the deliverability of our system for thousands
of customers, we have to suspend your account.

No offense. We just can't afford the risk.

 

Erm... Risky content ? What risky content ?

 

So I asked what they considered risky and they replied suggesting it was the test campaign I had set up when I started using Mailchimp.

Here is what it looks like when I log in to rescue my lists: -

 

OK so its a test email (and not a very good one - just me seeing how to use their tools really)

They have however closed my account with them for THAT EMAIL ABOVE.

I am quickly moving anyone else I have with Mailchimp accounts away, I have more than 10 clients using them but due to the chances of these getting banned too I am not discussing who they are until I have migrated them away.

If you have an account with Mailchimp I will leave it to you to decide what you do but I am not going to use them again, I dont like having services removed for no reason and didnt appreciate the fake polite banning emails at all.

You have been warned...

The Posterous API lets you post to Posterous, add comments, export your sites, and more

We recently announced our Twitter API, which lets you use Posterous as the image hosting service inside your favorite Twitter client. Since then we've been added by over a dozen of the top Twitter clients available!
 
Today we're taking the next step and releasing our full posting and reading API. On the posting side, the API lets you post to any of your sites, including media. You can also add comments to posts.
 
For reading, you can get a feed of public posts from any Posterous site. You can also do an authenticated read, and get to private posts and private sites. This enables anyone write an exporter if you ever decide you need one. We'll never hold your content hostage.

We're also announcing our Posterous Development Google Group. Join this group to share code, get help, suggest ideas, and report bugs in the API.
 
This is just the beginning. We're committed to making the API as rich and powerful as possible, to help you write great web publishing software. If there's anything more you'd like added, please suggest it in the Google Group!
 
http://groups.google.com/group/posterous-dev
http://posterous.com/api

mailchimp

Mail chimp is cool!
 

 

Sign up Here and get 30$ credit for free and 3 mailbox inspections for FREE. Just because you are friend of a friend.

Mailchimp really showed me something about customer care and usability. However it's not the cheapest thing I already sent out 600 emails (in 100 batches to play with the free account) and I have to tell i am amazed how easy to use the whole stuff. You can prepare top notch HTML emails easily, set up everything as you wish and track fully every single user and clicks of your campaign

Set it up with Google Analytics, measure and record everything and also check the reports provided by

Mailchimp to see your opening rates and stuff

It is truly the best Newsletter application I have seen so far.

Spirit of the Wolf